Hit-and-run fatal crashes rising in Colorado

Feb. 16, 2014

Priscilla Ingebrigtsen holds a pair of socks that were among a few of the personal possessions of her son, Jesse Pringle, after he died following a hit-and-run accident Aug. 9, 2012 in Lakewood. Police believe Heriberto Palacio was the driver of an SUV that hit Pringle, 26, as he rode his motorcycle. / Courtesy of the Pringle Family/9News

At least one person in the core of the metro Denver area is injured every day by a hit-and-run driver.

Almost three times a month, someone, likely a pedestrian, is killed in Colorado by a motorist who then flees the scene.

And a staggering 17 times a day in the city of Denver, someone reports a hit-and-run incident to police.

Legislators have passed a law to toughen criminal penalties and several cities have adopted alert systems to ask the public’s help in tracking down perpetrators.

But the carnage has continued.

Just last month near Windsor, 46-year-old Ernesto Wiedenbrug, who was riding a bicycle, died after being hit by a driver who fled the scene of the crash on the Interstate 25 frontage road between Kechter Road and Colorado Highway 392. Theresa Marie O’Connor, 28, has been charged with leaving the scene.

An I-News at Rocky Mountain PBS/9News investigation found:

• Hit-and-run fatalities are rising in Colorado as overall traffic deaths are falling. In 2012, 34 people were killed across Colorado by hit-and-run drivers, almost double the 18 deaths the year before. The result was the state ranked 10th in the U.S. in terms of hit-and-run fatalities per capita. Statistics for last year have not yet been compiled.

• A total of 104 people have been killed by hit-and-run drivers between 2008 and 2012. Almost two-thirds, or 64, were pedestrians or bicyclists.

• Between 2011 and 2013, about 1,300 people in the metro area’s three largest cities — Denver, Aurora and Lakewood — were injured or killed in hit-and-run accidents. That is more than one a day. The injuries ranged from bruises to paralysis.

• A breakdown of injury accidents by Lakewood police found that about one of every 13 injury hit-and-runs resulted in death or incapacitating trauma.

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• Denver police reported 18,662 hit-and-run accidents of all types, both injury and noninjury, during the past three years. That is an average of 17 a day.

“We all see the news on the number of hit-and-runs that are out there,” said Rep. Kathleen Conti, R-Littleton, sponsor of bills to crack down on the problem. “It just seems like it is an ever-increasing problem.”

Many cases go unsolved.

They include that of Jesse Pringle, 26, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, who was hit and fatally injured in an Aug. 9, 2012, hit-and-run while riding his motorcycle in Lakewood. Police have not been able to find their only suspect.

“We know he stopped for a second and then pretty clearly made a decision to flee,” said Priscilla Ingrbrigtsen, of the driver who killed her son, in an interview with 9News. “People saw him flee. We understand the hit. It’s the run we don’t understand. That’s the problem.”

Also unresolved is the hit-and-run death of David Pickett, who was killed riding his bicycle to work in Denver on May 16, 2011, just days after celebrating his 50th birthday. He routinely rode his bike 11 miles to work and made sure to call his wife each day to tell her he had arrived safely.

No one has been arrested in the March 2013 hit-and-run that killed 8-year-old Za May Khan and 6-year-old Ah Zet Khan as they were crossing the street in East Denver with their mother.

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The driver who hit Laurie Gorham, who was pregnant, in December 2010, killing her unborn child, also evaded arrest. Gorham was walking her dog in the Stapleton neighborhood when she was struck.

“It’s a tremendously huge problem,” said Larry Stevenson, former Denver police officer and founder of the Medina Alerts to enlist the public to help police catch hit-and-run drivers.

“When a hit-and-run occurs, law enforcement is looking for a ghost,” he said.

In addition, the abandonment of an injured victim by the side of the road can lead to delays in getting medical help, especially in sparsely populated areas, Conti said.

“When you get into rural areas, it’s much more likely to be life impacting with fewer witnesses around,” she said.

In some cases, police or passers-by have found dead victims of hit-and-run accidents lying on the side of the road long after the driver had fled, according to police reports.

The perpetrators have ranged from felons with lengthy criminal records to first-time offenders such as former Denver Bronco football player Billy Jenkins.

Sara Solnick, chairwoman of the of the Economics Department at the University of Vermont, said her study from the 1990s on pedestrian hit-and-run deaths showed that drivers who fled felt they had more to lose by staying on the scene.

“If they had a suspended license, or they didn’t have a license or they were underage, they were far more likely to do the hit-and-run,” Solnick said.

Alcohol was another major factor. “They were more likely to have a high blood alcohol content,” she said.

Drivers also weighed the chances of getting caught, Solnick’s study found. “The other factor was if they felt they could get away with it,” she said.

As a result, hit-and-run incidents were more common at night and least likely if a child was hit, Solnick’s study showed.

In Colorado, only three of the 104 hit-and-run fatalities between 2008 and 2012 were children younger than 10.

“For a child there is more likely to be a witness,” she said. “There would more likely be other children or adults or some kind of supervision.”

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A follow-up study released in 2011 by the University of California at Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center found hit-and-run fatalities were more likely to occur in the West and Midwest and that the drivers were likely to be male, young and have prior convictions.

Several measures have been put in place to try to crack down on hit-and-run cases in Colorado.

In 2012, the state Legislature passed a law, co-sponsored by Conti and Rep. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, increasing the potential prison sentence for hit-and-run cases resulting in substantial bodily injury.

That same year, Stevenson launched the Medina Alert program in Denver to get information out to the public and transportation providers to help apprehend drivers who have fled the scene of accidents. It is based on the Amber Alert for missing children.

It is named after Jose Medina, who on his first day of work as a parking valet was killed in a hit-and-run accident in January 2011. Stevenson recalls going to a memorial for Medina and meeting his mother, Linda.

“His mother just made a passing comment when I was walking out the door, ‘Don’t let them forget about my baby,’ ” Stevenson said.

The driver was eventually caught and sent to prison.

This year, the Legislature is taking up a bill, sponsored by Conti, to formalize the alert system through the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Alerts would be issued for serious injury and fatal cases in which there is a description of the suspect, car and at least a partial license plate number.